


Cuckoo's Egg

by Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Absent Characters, Absent Parents, Alternate Reality, Altitude sickness, Angst, Bathing/Washing, Crossing Timelines, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dragons, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fantasy, Fluff and Angst, Freezing, Friendship/Love, Gen, Gen Work, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Mother-Son Relationship, Parent-Child Relationship, Parenthood, Plotty, Season/Series 09, Weird Fluff, Weirdness, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-13
Updated: 2014-03-13
Packaged: 2018-01-15 14:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1308346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam wakes in a very strange place where reality is unraveling, and meets a being who gives him something he never knew he desperately needed. He questions whether his current bizarre existence might be the real one—if perhaps his previous life with Dean was the dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cuckoo's Egg

**Author's Note:**

> The title is borrowed from a C.J. Cherryh novel.

Sam woke to a sense of utter disorientation of both time and space. He had no idea where he was, how he had gotten there, or what events had led up to this bizarre awakening.

Granted that this sort of thing happened to him far, far more often than any ordinary human being could expect, this was one for the books.

He was curled tightly in a fetal position, and he was wet—sticky, even—covered in some sort of viscous fluid. As he blinked open gummy eyes, he gradually realized that there was dim, diffuse light penetrating the semi-darkness in a pearlescent haze all around him.

He could breathe, but barely, and as he tried to take a deep breath, the fluid got into his mouth and nose and he coughed violently. He tried to stretch out, to extend his limbs, but he couldn’t. He fought the panic that seeped through him as he realized he was trapped in a very small space, so tight his body barely fit in it.

His first thought was that he was tied in a sack, probably in someone’s trunk. A car trunk would be completely dark, though, so the light didn’t make sense. Regardless, his captors must think that he was dead already, or intend for him to be soon, having shut him in this tight space where there was very little air. 

Instinctively, he lashed out with all his strength and all four limbs. He was assaulted by vertigo as the motion rolled him over several times, but to his relief, he felt some give where he kicked. He braced his back against his prison and kicked harder. He gasped in relief when the third kick let in a rush of cold air that washed over his legs. He looked down and saw bright light by his feet. He kicked and thrashed to expand the hole he’d made, flailing with his arms too, and he was suddenly blasted by bright light and icy air as his prison fell to pieces around him.

He gratefully sucked in several deep draughts of air, but it felt razor-sharp, almost too cold to breathe, and it burned in his chest. The light blinded him; as he shaded his eyes and looked up, he perceived that he was outdoors and the sun was directly above him. He crouched, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He shivered violently as the wind scoured his skin; he realized he was naked, as well as wet with the viscous substance. His breath made a cloud around his head, and steam rose from the ground under him, from the fragments of whatever had bound him.

He touched one of these, examining it. It was mottled brown and white, hard, and leathery. There was something familiar about it that he couldn’t process. He picked up one of the largest fragments and set it against another one that fit its edge. Together, the fragments formed part of a large oval.

An _egg._ He’d been trapped inside a _goddamn egg._

His relief at his escape dissolved in the face of the dangerously strange situation. He felt sluggish despite the biting cold, still horribly disoriented; he coughed as fluid dribbled out of his ears, mouth, and nose, and a picture of his surroundings slowly began to form.

He was in a rough circle the size of a hotel ballroom, fenced in on three sides by large stones, a bit less than his height in the lower places, twice that at the highest. The fourth side was a taller, solid stone wall behind him, with an overhang that sheltered him somewhat. As he moved out from under it, staggering toward the edge of the circle, the wind got much colder. His hands and feet were already turning numb.

When he peered over a low spot in the wall, sick terror washed over him in an ice-cold wave.

He was looking down at clouds, pierced with jagged, rocky peaks that were tipped here and there with snow. He was on the side of a mountain.

That was why he could barely breathe, why the sun was so unbearably bright and the wind so savage. He must be at an extreme altitude, and if he didn’t figure something out very quickly, he would die there.

Shivering violently, he searched for any way to make shelter for himself. There was nothing within the circle except stones and the fragments of the egg, which were now rimed with frost where the viscous fluid was already freezing. Nearly all of the stones were too large for him to lift, and if he tried to pile up the smaller ones to make a shelter, he’d surely freeze before he got anything useful done.

Desperately, he started gathering the fragments of the egg, reasoning that if he’d fit in it before, he might still be able to gain some shelter from it, under the overhang. He realized the hypothermia must be getting serious when his hands were too clumsy to hold the pieces; he kept dropping them, and every step was a stumble, and finally he fell to his knees, holding back a sob. 

It came to him that this was his death.

“Dean,” he whispered. Dean would never forgive him if he died like this, if he left him alone. 

Maybe—and Sam felt a flutter of hope blossom in his aching chest—maybe he was dreaming. He must be. How could he hatch out of an _egg,_ on an insanely high peak in the middle of a mountain range, when the last thing he remembered was checking into an ordinary motel room with Dean? Yes, he thought, hugging himself for the paltry warmth it offered, if he could just visualize that motel room, remember what it had looked like before he fell asleep, he would wake up there. 

But he couldn’t bring the room into focus in his memory. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked to Dean or what the last case was that they’d worked. And he couldn’t remember ever feeling so much pain in a dream. Every breath hurt his chest, and his hands and feet were so cold they felt hot, sending piercing pain all up and down his limbs as his eyesight blurred.

“Sorry, Dean,” he whispered. This was the end. There was comfort in that; that it was all over. It could get no worse.

Just then, it did.

He would never be able to describe the sound he heard as a sharp black shadow enveloped him, blotting out the sun entirely. It was something like a bassoon blast mated with the shrieking hinge of a rusty screen door—but played over giant loudspeakers in a football stadium, and accented, underneath, by something that, ludicrously, reminded Sam of the low chuckle of a chicken scratching in the dirt. He was losing it. This was his insanity, that _sound,_ and the ground rumbling beneath him, and there was a slurping _pop_ as the air was sucked away abruptly, taking all reason with it, pulling him half up off his knees.

He looked up—and _up_ —into the yellow, reptilian eyes of a dragon.

Strange, how in this new reality he had just been born— _hatched_ —into, in this place where these things could happen, he instantly recognized what it was. Huge, shining, paradoxical, filling the entire world with its glorious impossibility. Hammering death into Sam’s heart.

A hoarse shout ripped itself from his throat as he leapt up and fled. He forgot the cold, the altitude, and his despair in the primeval terror that shocked him awake, and he sprinted away from the enormous monstrosity, toward the low spot in the wall and over, scrambling across the rocks, knowing he could never climb down and that certain death awaited, as sure where he fled as in what he fled from, and perhaps sooner. But at least he would not be torn apart by those yard-long teeth, not like poor Dean and the hellhounds; at least he wouldn’t feed some evil monster with his death—

There was nothing but air underneath him. And then there was.

Solidity wrapped him, and a slight crushing sensation. The dragon had simply put out its taloned—paw? foot? — and caught Sam in it, just as he was about to plummet into the void.

It gathered him with bizarre, unreal gentleness back into the circle and against its belly, making the screen-door-bassoon sound again, softer this time. Sam’s ears still popped slightly at tones lower than he could hear.

He struggled fruitlessly, pounding on the great digits that wrapped him, casting about for something—a stone, a fragment of the egg—to use as a weapon, but after a moment he went still, as something even more inescapable than his impending death washed over him. _Warmth._

The dragon’s paw was warm, but its scaled belly was _hot,_ like stepping into a steaming bath in a cold room. Sam cried out instinctively as he was tucked inexorably against the scales, but after a moment he realized they were not hot enough to burn him. And even if they were, he’d take it. He had not realized what an awful death freezing would be, until he was rescued from it. As he surrendered to the blissful heat that surrounded him, the relief was so exquisite that it was a new, lovely pain. He would not freeze. Maybe the yard-long teeth wouldn’t be so bad after all.

He wondered how many more deaths he would face before he woke from this very, very strange dream.

~* * *~

He did not wake. He was not sleeping. He doubted even _his_ subconscious—he, a hunter of all the strangest things in the world—could create this.

The dragon thought he was her baby.

Sam had spent about an hour dying. Every moment was another death. When she moved him in her claws, back under the overhang. When he tried to run away, once her claws relaxed enough for him to get loose, and she snatched him back against her with every appearance of maternal irritation. And, lastly and most terrifyingly, when she began to lick him from head to toe with her hot, yards-long, forked tongue.

This tongue-bath was not unpleasant in the end. The dragon’s breath was steamy and her tongue slightly rough, so it was like being rubbed with a loofah in a sauna. Sam relaxed despite himself as the heat comforted him and the symptoms of hypothermia slipped away. He turned himself variously and tucked protectively so she wouldn’t lick him anywhere too… personal; she seemed unaware of any distinctions in his anatomy that way. 

He squinted his eyes closed when her tongue threatened them, and flinched at her repeated attentions to his hair, which she seemed to be trying to lick away. He was relieved that he seemed able to communicate with her at least a little; when he yelped in pain when her tongue ripped out a strand of hair, she rumbled apologetically, and left off licking his head.

He tried to bring this extraordinary situation to terms with his reality. He knew dragons; he and Dean had encountered and killed them before. This dragon was obviously not of that kind. For one, she was far, far larger: larger than any animal Sam knew of on Earth, except possibly the blue whale. A dragon of the kind he knew would have no reason to live on a high mountainside, or to be particularly interested in Sam, as he was not a virgin. There was no indication that this dragon had a gold hoard. Clearly, she did not have a human form or human intelligence; although she sometimes responded with sounds of her own when Sam spoke (or screamed) to her, there was no sign that she understood his words.

Well, Sam reflected, no wonder she thought he was her hatchling—he had come out of an egg in her nest. And _that._ What the hell was that? How could he possibly have gotten there? Had the dragon actually _laid_ the egg he was in? And how long had he been inside it? 

His mind could not accept his circumstances, and this was how he came to realize he was _not_ dreaming. All of his life, the strangest, most nonsensical imagery had always seemed perfectly rational and everyday while he was dreaming, like, of course he had taken the Pope waterskiing to thank her for the lovely sweater she’d knitted him—that was only polite. Only upon waking did he ever realize the unreality and illogic of these images. Since everything now seemed epitomally unreal and illogical, he must be awake.

“Listen,” he said to the dragon, as she settled down contentedly and nuzzled her hot nose against him where he sat in the circle of her forelegs. “I’m not your baby. Uh, I know how this looks… hatching from your egg and all. But I can’t live for long at this altitude, even if I got food and water. And I’ll never be able to fly.”

She made the chicken-noise, her softest sound, still loud enough to vibrate in Sam’s chest. Her eyes were drifting closed.

Now that the danger seemed to have passed, Sam examined her. She was extraordinary. The ballroom-sized circle was a cozy nest for her; she could move around inside it, but when she curled around Sam as he lay near the cliff side, her back was against the outer wall. Her long, slim body was silvery-gray with a faint, metallic gleam; she blended with the rocks of the mountainside. The only other color on her was buried in the scales of her neck, just beyond the hinge of her jaw. Sam only saw it when she made the chicken-noise, which he came to recognize as happy and content. When she did, the flaps at her jaw fanned out and revealed vivid purple spots with a yellow center, like violets.

He decided to call her Violet.

As Violet took her nap in the midday sun, Sam reviewed his choices. He could steal away while she slept, and try to climb down the side of a mountain, naked, in sub-zero temperatures, and most likely fall to his death before he could freeze. He’d had a taste of that flavor of death, and it was not to his liking.

Or he could stay here, warm, with Violet. With an effort, he let go of his fear and his need to escape, to return to Dean, to solve the problem, as he had been doing his whole life. He focused on the moment, and, acid-trip strangeness aside, it wasn’t so bad. Violet wasn’t so bad. 

As he thought this, she nuzzled him in her sleep. Her tongue poked out lazily and gave him a few more swipes before she tucked him, like a doll, up off the hard stone ground onto her forearm, and rested her chin over him, so he was tucked in the hollow of her throat. It was like lying on a very warm leather couch, swathed in leather blankets.

He lay still, utterly nonplussed, and analyzed the feeling that crept over him.

He felt… safe. And loved. The rough animal affection that she showed him, bathing him, making him warm, keeping him close—it had been terrifying at first, until he’d understood what it was, and then it had just felt… good, and _necessary._ He realized that, symbolically, he _was_ what she believed him to be. Newborn in this strange world (he did wonder, remotely, if he were still on Earth), naked, squalling, and helpless, utterly dependent on her for life.

One tenet had been drilled into Sam from an early age: monsters were evil and should be eradicated. He had had cause to question this prime directive before, but never more than now.

Perhaps the difference was that Violet wasn’t a monster. Sam wasn’t even sure that she was supernatural. She was just an animal, behaving with animal instincts, and not only had she not harmed him, she had saved his life. Her presence was all that kept him alive now.

He reflected that this might not last. Although relieved of his hypothermia and presently quite comfortable, he was beginning to get hungry. More worrisome was his rapidly increasing thirst. If Violet followed her current pattern of mothering him quite competently, she would presumably bring him food, though he flinched at the thought of what that might be. But he could see no way that she could get water to this high, dry, desolate place, if she even understood that he needed it.

As he was thinking this, Violet stirred and raised her head. She grasped Sam and set him aside on the ground, like a grandmother setting her glasses on her nightstand, and casually stood up, stretching, for all the world like a Labrador retriever waking from a nap in front of the fireplace. Only she _was_ the fireplace, and as she stepped away from Sam, subzero winds blasted him and he cried out in protest.

“Violet!” he shouted desperately. Hardly believing his change in attitude from an hour ago, he rushed to her side and grabbed her forearm before she could move away. “If you leave me here, I’ll freeze to death! I’m not a dragon, I can’t—”

His protest was choked off when she picked him up again matter-of-factly, like a cat lifting a kitten by the scruff. She burbled reassuringly at him and looked down at him contemplatively, with an almost-hilariously clear expression of, “Hmmm, what to do?” She folded one digit so that the claw was no danger to Sam, and poked him appraisingly with her knuckle, adding a few swipes of her tongue.

Sam had a sudden idea. “Take me with you!” he shouted. “You can take me to where I can find water and—”

She apparently had a different idea. With Sam in one forefoot, she sat back on her haunches and started picking up huge stones from the wall with her other, seemingly idly. She set these in a circle under the overhang, then stood up—and _up_ —on her back legs. She glanced down at Sam again and held him at “arm’s” length, away from her body.

Then she breathed fire.

Sam shouted himself hoarse when she did. He’d sort of been expecting it eventually, but it was still shocking, and terrifying this close. He curled into a ball inside her fist, tucking his legs inside it as they felt the near-blistering heat. His eyes were tightly closed as she put him down—somewhere hot? 

When he opened his eyes, he was not against her belly as he’d expected. She’d set him down inside the circle of rocks she’d made, then heated with her breath. To his panic, she was moving away, and he was trapped inside a rock cage.

“Violet! Violet, wait!” he shrieked. But she gathered herself on the edge of the cliff, her wings sprang open—monstrously, unthinkably huge, silver and beautiful in the sun—and she launched herself into the air.

“OK, I’ll just stay here then, thanks!” Sam shouted sarcastically as she swooped low over the nest. He couldn’t help laughing as she crooned a reply that sounded like a casual, cheerful “see you later!” and flew away.

He sat down, thoroughly dumbfounded. He laughed at himself, talking to the dragon as if she could understand, using the name he’d given her in his mind. What was funnier was that she responded to it all completely naturally, as if it were all just what she’d expect.

He looked around himself, impressed with Violet’s ingenuity. Maybe she was smarter than he’d thought. A regular reptile would not be able to intuit that he needed warm shelter. She had clearly thought it was safe to leave him there, until he’d protested, then she had built and heated the perfect shelter for him in her absence. She’d piled the rocks under the overhang, so there was most of a roof, and close enough together that it was decent shelter from the wind. And then… heated the rocks. Unbelievable. If he stayed where he was, he’d be warm enough for hours, he suspected. He quickly learned not to touch the rocks; his arm got slightly burned when he brushed against one, exploring the limits of his prison. Not knowing anything else to do, he sat down and awaited Violet’s return.

She came back within an hour or so with some kind of horned sheep, not quite dead. Sam cringed in horror as she set it down and reached two dexterous fingers, carefully bent to avoid claw contact, into his cage, plucked him out of it, and set him next to the dying animal. She then sat back on her haunches, watching him expectantly.

“Oh, Violet. Uh, I appreciate the thought, but I can’t—oh _God.”_ He uttered this last when Violet, politely and encouragingly, disemboweled the sheep neatly with one claw, and delicately offered Sam the entrails speared on the end of it.

The smell was horrifying, and far too close to his face. Sam couldn’t help it; he turned away and retched, bringing up nothing but a bit of bile. This elicited the loud bassoon-screen-door sound of distress from Violet again; Sam folded in on himself, cringing. Then silence fell.

After a moment, Violet gave a soft, thoughtful little croon and scooped up the dead sheep. She sniffed it inquisitively, and if Sam hadn’t felt so sick, he’d have laughed again at her expression of, “Hmmm, seems like perfectly good sheep to me!” She looked at Sam with one huge yellow eye and blinked slowly. 

She took the sheep and… peeled it. Sam was used to blood and gore; now that it wasn’t directly in his face and about to be stuffed forcefully into his mouth, he relaxed a little and watched with interest. Violet set the sheep’s skin aside and scooped out its insides, which she popped into her mouth contemplatively, like someone chewing on a pencil while doing a math problem. Sam winced a little, but he couldn’t look away. He felt like he could see the wheels turn in Violet’s head while she looked between him and the sheep. 

Then she roasted the sheep for him.

He couldn’t help it; he laughed and clapped as she neatly finished it off, stopping the gush of fire from her mouth and blowing a final puff of steam over the mutton with what Sam would swear was a chef’s flourish. She looked at him expectantly.

He laughed again, and picked up a sharp stone that he’d found inside his cage while she was gone and adopted as an all-purpose tool. He sat down next to the meal Violet had prepared for him and started sawing a piece off. “Soup’s on!” he said cheerfully, and was rewarded by Violet’s happy chicken-chuckle.

~* * *~

Over the next few days, Sam fell into an oddly contented pattern of life with Violet. He took the discarded sheepskin and scraped it as well as he could with his sharp stone, and was able to create a sort of wrap for himself. He added to it with the skins of other animals she brought, skinned, and roasted for him, sawing the hide with his stone into shapes he could tie together and wear, until he had a very caveman-like outfit. It smelled horrible, but at least it provided some warmth, and something besides bare stone (and Violet) to lie on. Violet disdained the outfit; she plucked it off of him peremptorily every time she settled down to cuddle with him, as he came to think of it.

She heated his little rock cairn for him—he’d stopped thinking of it as his cage—and placed him in it every time she left to get food for herself or him. He’d found a way out the second time; there was a space between rocks large enough to crawl through, though he had to take care not to get burned brushing against them. He’d been contemplating the problem of water. He was able to suck quite a bit of juice from the meat Violet provided, which might stave off death for a while, but he was getting very dehydrated. Finally, after climbing carefully around the confines of the nest, with frequent returns to his shelter to keep from freezing, he’d found a deposit of frozen snow tucked into a shadowy niche. He was able to scoop some into one of the egg fragments and bring it back into his heated cairn, where it melted into enough water to keep him alive. 

Violet inspected him often, making curious noises and nuzzling his back and arms. He thought she might be wondering why he never grew bigger, and why he didn’t have wings, but she simply accepted and loved her strange, ugly hatchling without reservations. 

He was bemused to find that he loved her in return. What was not to love? She provided for him, was very tender and careful with him, and lavished him with affection, which, while extremely peculiar in its form, had a deep, intrinsic appeal. Whenever she returned from a hunting trip, she crooned a greeting as she settled into the nest, and though the ground rumbled and Sam’s chest vibrated every time she did it, he had stopped thinking of the sound as too loud. She always plucked him out of his cairn the moment she returned and tucked him against her belly, bathing him thoroughly and making her happy chicken-burble. Once, when she’d been gone for hours and the rocks had begun to cool, leaving Sam huddled shivering from the wind that seeped through the cracks, he’d found himself weeping when she gathered him close upon her return. When she tucked him against her and crooned softly, he felt like she was saying his name.

His only lack was someone to talk to, or, rather, someone who could talk back. Violet knew her name and responded to him with various croons and warbles whenever he spoke to her. Sam had long talks with her about his lost dreams, his fears and pains, and the rare joys of the life he’d lived. She listened, nuzzling and bathing him until she fell asleep to the sound of his voice. 

He told her all about Dean, whom he missed sorely and feared for terribly. This fear was the only thing that drove him toward an escape he no longer wanted. He didn’t particularly want to return to his life, but he knew he couldn’t stay on this mountaintop with Violet forever. He knew that if Dean was alive, he’d be searching for him and worrying about him, and knowing Dean, he’d get himself into crazy trouble doing it.

Sam also knew he couldn’t survive on a meat-only diet forever. His body was already rejecting it; he found it hard to eat enough to sustain himself. This clearly worried Violet, who tore tidbits off the roasts she made him and tried to feed them to him, delicately, with the tips of her claws while she crooned encouragingly. Sam had a vision of a mother with a finicky toddler, making airplane noises as she flew the spoon toward her child’s mouth.

He tried many times to get Violet to take him with her on her hunting trips. He clung to her forefoot when she picked him up, all the while begging her to take him with her, but she barely seemed to notice. Having lost all fear of her, he tried climbing onto her back and clinging to her neck. She allowed this without seeming to understand why he did it; when she decided to leave, she simply reached back, plucked him off, and set him in his cairn as usual. 

He’d contemplated choosing a “warm” day—that is, one where the temperature climbed above zero—and trying to climb down the mountain while she was gone. He had clothing of a sort now, and if he could reach shelter within a few hours, he might survive. But his explorations informed him that the climb was thoroughly impossible, and besides, it felt like a betrayal of Violet’s tender care. 

One morning, Violet had him tucked under her chin as usual while she took her after-breakfast nap. She slept a lot, and Sam found that the altitude, though he’d adjusted to it somewhat, caused him to sleep far more than normal, too. So he was dozing with her, his sleep disturbed by his growing worry about Dean, when she suddenly sat bolt upright, dumping him on the ground, and made a sound Sam had never heard her make before, a deafening, earth-shaking trumpet of alarm. She spread her wings protectively, so he couldn’t see what caused her distress.

Far more startling than this extreme response was the sound of a human voice.

~* * *~

“Sam. Good. Dean has been searching for you.”

Sam moved forward to peer under the tip of Violet’s wing and saw Castiel, standing inside the nest as calmly as he’d stand too close to Dean in a motel room. 

For the second time in recent days, Sam had to readjust his view of reality instantly and completely. He now realized that he’d begun to wonder, in some deep primeval corner of his mind, if his life before—Dean, hunting, using things like cars and cell phones—had been the dream, and this was his real life. If he really was a dragon hatchling, and his place in the world was here with his mother. His memory was hazy anyway, and had not improved in the days he’d spent with Violet. He had never figured out how he’d gotten here.

At the sight of Cas, his other life came flooding back—and his first job was to protect Cas from Violet, who kept trumpeting hysterically and poking her nose toward Cas in a clear “get away” gesture. Cas simply looked at her, and finally, she gathered her breath and sat back in the way Sam knew meant she was about to breathe fire.

“VIOLET! No! Don’t hurt him! He’s a friend! A friend, Violet, stop!” Sam scrambled under Violet’s wing and grabbed her extended neck-flap to get her attention. He cried out and snatched his hand back reflexively—her throat was burning-hot from the flames inside. 

She looked down at him and gulped, exhaling steam from her nostrils, and gave a questioning croon that sounded so clearly like “who the hell is this?” that Sam laughed in relief.

Sam had never seen the inscrutable angel so surprised. Cas looked between Sam and the dragon with a bewildered expression, and finally said, flatly, “A dragon. Named Violet?” 

He turned to Sam questioningly, then said, “Why are you dressed like a caveman?” just as Sam said, “Is Dean all right?”

“Dean is well, but very worried about you. I came to find you as soon as I got my grace back. Well, not mine, but that’s another story. I am far more interested in yours.”

 _“What_ about your grace? You lost it?”

Cas tilted his head quizzically, and was silent for a long moment, long enough to let Sam know that he’d said something wrong. “What is the last thing you remember?” he asked finally, but was interrupted by another ear-bending, anxious trumpet from Violet.

“Hang on,” said Sam, “Let me explain some things to her—I don’t want her to hurt you—” 

“She cannot hurt me. But she will not hurt _you_?”

Sam stepped against Violet’s foreleg and stroked it, speaking in a soothing voice. “No, she won’t hurt me,” he told Cas. “She’s the only reason I’m alive right now. She’s not like the dragons we know; she’s not evil. Violet, this is Cas. He’s my friend, another human like me—well, he has a human body. He’s an angel actually, that’s why he could fly, to get here…” He stopped, realizing it didn’t matter what he said, just that he spoke reassuringly. It seemed to be working; Violet folded her wings, watching Cas suspiciously.

“Don’t make any sudden moves,” Sam advised. “Cas, do you have any idea how I got here? And… where _is_ here?”

“We are in the Himalayan Mountains.”

Sam nodded. He’d suspected that must be the mountain range when he recognized one of the animals Violet brought as a water buffalo. 

“You asked what the last thing I could remember was, and… I don’t know. There’s a lot that’s really foggy.” He peered at Cas, and flinched a little, guiltily. “Um… you seem good now, but last I remember, you were kind of… crazy. After you saved me from Lucifer, from the memories of the cage… we left you with Meg…”

Cas blinked. _“That’s_ the last thing you can remember?”

“I remember… some other things. Leviathan. Dick Roman trying to make the world his meat-factory… we were trying to stop him, but I can’t remember details…” He stopped. “Cas. What’s going on? Do you know… I swear I’m not crazy. Do you know how I could’ve… gotten inside a dragon egg? I… I _hatched,_ Cas.”

“That is strange, but I suppose it is no more than we can expect. I have seen stranger things, since Dean made a crack in reality.”

“Uh, what?” Sam said. But it made sense, in a way. He’d known this wasn’t _reality_ reality. 

“He made a deal with a god to save you from death. After the Trials. You were dying, beyond the help of angelic healing, even if I had been an angel at the time.”

“A… a god?”

“Yes. Though he did not know who, or what, it was. I believe the god was Chaos, which explains the… strangeness of your salvation. Perhaps Dean would not have done it, if he’d known what the consequence to the world would be. Or… he would. The alternative was your death beyond resurrection.”

“So he… had me put inside a dragon egg?”

“The god only promised that you would be remade, whole. Your body was…” He paused. “You remember nothing of the Trials, Sam?”

“No. Trials for what?”

“To close the gates of Hell.” He looked at Sam again. “You do not remember Dean’s stay in Purgatory?”

 _“Purgatory?_ No! Did he—is he—how did we get him out?”

Cas was silent for a long moment. “Sam… what you remember of the Leviathan, that was over a year ago. I… there will be much to explain. I will leave that to Dean. But first, I must heal the rift that is causing all these aberrations. I believe it is starting to affect time itself. Dean was having trouble remembering things, too, and placing events appropriately in his timeline.” 

He glanced up at Violet, who was watching their conversation avidly, like the most mesmerizing TV program. “Also, there are now things like… dragons.”

“Are there others?” Sam asked. “I wondered… Violet, she isn’t a monster. She’s not like a magical creature at all, other than the fire-breathing. She just seems like… a really intelligent animal.”

“She is the first I’ve seen. But I have seen other very strange things; she is not the only anomaly. Dean has had to rely on my help. There are things that you both experienced that didn’t happen in this new reality, as well as new memories being created of things he never actually experienced in his own timeline. It is good that I regained my grace—as an angel, I am immune to the fluctuations.”

Sam hesitated, looking at Violet. “What about her? Did she… not exist before?”

“She is not part of your original reality. There is a great deal of temporal disturbance around her. She may just be an undiscovered species of dinosaur from Earth’s past, or she might be part of an alternate reality. It is impossible to tell. I may know once I fix the rift.” 

“Can you do that? Fix it?”

“I believe I can, yes. I have discovered a way to reverse Chaos’s spell, and a way to protect you so you do not return to the state you were in before it was cast. I do not know what will happen to all the beings that bled over into this reality… once normal reality is restored.” He was looking at Sam with compassion, and an unexpected depth of understanding.

Sam looked at Violet. She crooned at him, settling down in the nest. She finally took her eyes off Cas and rested her head on her forelegs with a mournful expression.

Sam’s heart tore. For a moment, he wondered if he should tell Cas not to reverse the spell. Or if he should just stay with Violet when he did, and see if he’d be drawn into her world with her. Maybe that was his real life, the one he’d been meant to live. The one where he had a mother.

When he left here, he would never see her again. The thought was unbearable, and he thought she could feel it, too. But when he thought of staying, his heart tore again, this time for Dean, who had nearly destroyed the whole world, just to save Sam. And if Sam tried to leave that world, he would probably do it again. He missed Dean; that had been the only dark spot in this time with Violet. His brother, his family. If he belonged anywhere, wasn’t it with him?

“Violet,” he said softly. He stroked her neck-flap, now cool enough to touch. She crooned, and tucked him under her chin. He put his arms around her neck as far as they would go, and wept silently. For a long moment, he couldn’t remember how to let go.

He extracted himself finally and sat on her foreleg, his hand on her neck. He had no idea how to say goodbye, how to tell her, without language, what she had meant to him. She had given him his life, and much more than that.

“Thanks for taking such good care of me,” he said finally.

She closed her eyes and made a tiny chicken-chuckle, but it did not sound contented this time. “All hatchlings leave the nest sometime, Violet,” he said, stroking her eyelids. “You kept waiting for me to grow wings, but I’ll have to borrow Cas’s instead.”

He stood up and turned away. This wasn’t going to get any easier. “Maybe you can lay another egg someday, back in your reality,” he said. “And maybe that baby won’t be so much trouble.”

She crooned again and licked him once, desultorily, before turning her head to the wall. Sam didn’t try to hide his tears as Cas placed his fingers on his forehead, and the image of the only mother he’d ever known swirled away.

~The End~


End file.
